


Satisfaction

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-22
Updated: 2003-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:29:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1629134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry has enough.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Satisfaction

**Author's Note:**

> Written for ShadeAngel

 

 

Satisfaction  
December 22, 2003 

Disclaimers: Not mine, I'm just playing. 

Spoilers: Up through OotP. 

Summary: Harry has enough. 

Ratings Note: PG. 

Author's Note: Written for yuletide. Happy merry, ShadeAngel! 

Acknowledgments: To Branwyn for audiencing and deeply helpful suggestions. 

* 

Harry isn't suicidal. 

There'd been a long stretch of time when he was sixteen, months spent trying and failing to deal with everything Dumbledore had said (and hadn't) after Sirius died when it would've been possible, but... 

It's a matter of abstraction and hindsight. 

Back then, he was too busy repressing incoherent rage to wish for his _own_ death. 

And now... 

Well. 

He knows what they say about his latest acquisition. He's fully aware of _just_ how morbid it is when considered by the average person, and yet... there's something to be said about completion. 

Narcissa Malfoy had, with the help of several of her compatriots and minions -- the distinction had often been difficult to make -- denuded the Ministry of most of its artifacts over the course of a year when they'd all been too busy to pay attention to matters of theft and _property_ destruction. 

It's been nearly twenty years and they still haven't recovered everything. 

And it's not as though Harry thinks they _will_ , even with his money and not-new-at-all-anymore leisure, it's just... 

The archway has a room of its own within the manor. 

He has long since removed all of the other furnishings, and hexed the walls and floor into plain stone. 

It still doesn't go with anything. It still doesn't fit. 

"It isn't supposed to, Harry," says the voice in his mind that he calls 'Dumbledore' more for the sake of ease than anything else. 

The man has been dead for a long, long time, and his portraits never say anything at all to him, anymore. 

And the archway... 

Completion isn't the whole of his reasoning. 

Everyone -- _everyone_ knows that -- hence the looks, the talk he isn't supposed to know about, and the careful questions about seemingly everything _but_ the artifact itself. 

Sometimes Harry wishes that he hadn't been quite so _thorough_ about involving himself in the magical world. 

It had, of course, seemed like a good idea at the time. 

There he'd been, free of everything and everyone trying to kill him, and thus free of his _blood_... 

Why _not_ claim the less troubling parts of his birthright? 

But being Harry Potter means being a host, being a friend, and being _Harry Potter_. 

It had taken _years_ to retire himself from the Ministry, and the social obligations remain. 

Which is, for the most part, well enough. 

He's never been averse to spending time with people who _aren't_ actively trying to torture or kill him, and there are many fascinating witches and wizards out there. 

Friends, even. 

But they see him here, and they _feel_ the archway no matter how many doors it's locked behind, no matter how many enchantments keep careless feet away from the hall, and... 

They feel it. 

Death. 

When he's honest with himself; he can feel it, too. 

It's just not especially _different_ from the general run of things. Death has been, and will always be, everywhere. The flowers the house-elves pick and enchant to within an inch of their lives, the grey in his hair. 

Everywhere. 

Having a focal point for it, a solid representation of the _possibility_ of it, is almost soothing. 

As though the rest of the world is somehow made safer by the archway's existence. 

Which is, of course, absurd, but Harry has found that emotions don't _have_ to make sense. 

And they're often easier to deal with when they don't, entirely. 

"You've lost yourself," Dumbledore had said from behind a wall of enchanted oil paint. "And I am sorry." 

They think... Creevey, Ron, Hermione, the others. They think this is about Sirius. 

They are, of course, correct. 

Just not correct _enough_. 

Harry is done with his grief, long since done, and has moved on, and all of those other healthy, useful things. 

He'd given up on having something like a father when Sirius had still been _alive_ \-- it hadn't been in the man. 

It just took time to understand that. 

He has had... so very much time. Dreams and vague desires and questions and the memory of the man's arms around him, of the way his skin had never been so feverish as the light behind his eyes. 

The _hunger_ there, for everything and anything he'd been able to touch. 

It's been a quarter of a century, and Harry has yet to finish a meal without remembering, at least once, the way Sirius had eaten. 

"I've been starving for twelve years," he'd said, once, staring at Harry over the rim of a glass of pumpkin juice. Swallowing and swallowing. 

He would like to see that again. He thinks it would be... Pleasant is not the word, but it's close enough. 

Azkaban had broken Sirius, twisted him in ways that even the war never managed for the people who survived. 

Harry had never seen the man's like, before or since. 

Everything and everyone else... 

Bland. Predictable. 

Exhausting. 

The veil shifts and moves with a wind that comes from nowhere at all, not even from _behind_ the thing -- and Harry had checked, carefully. 

This is, and will always be, the true meaning of magic to him: the willful surrender of sense for the simple tidal rushes of power, emotion, and will. 

The endless, inescapable presence of death. 

The stone pressing cold into his back and legs as he sits, and watches, and waits. 

He isn't suicidal. 

In Harry's experience, the fatal -- he forgives himself the pun -- flaw of most depressives is their lack of faith. They can only ever see _themselves_ , and so fall into endless, boring loops of self-examination and recrimination until they finally put themselves out of their own misery. 

Harry believes. 

So much so that he thinks... 

He understands Dumbledore's point. He always has. 

He is not the boy he used to be, in more ways than he can count. It has nothing to do his premature grey, and everything to do with being... tired. He thinks that's the right word for it. 

There were ways of being, of _living_ in this world that meant you were raw, that meant you were open to every hurt, every slight, and every betrayal. That meant you were _vulnerable_. 

Harry hadn't been able to afford vulnerability as a sixteen year old. 

He can, conceivably, afford it now. The world has become nearly as safe as the archway makes it feel, after all. 

He knows what it means that he's pinned his hopes and his _self_ to a man who was dead before he'd even reached his full height. To a phantom lost beyond a curiosity. 

He knows that it is, perhaps, not the _best_ way to go about the day-to-day process of living. 

He smiles to himself, and perhaps a little to the veil and whatever may or may not be beyond it. 

It's _his_ way. 

And Harry is content. 

He gets to his feet, stretching the chill out of muscle and bone. 

Caresses the edge of the archway, and cups it in his palm. 

He'll figure it out, eventually. 

And if he doesn't... 

That's all right, too. 

end. 

 


End file.
